I ONCE worked with a woman who took her husband’s wages at the end of the week. She would pay the bills, make him furnish receipts for expenditure, and then assign him whatever spending money he “needed” at the end of the month. His was shift based work, hers a salary, so the proportion of what he got altered month to month. Some people thought this was horrific: a bureaucratic nightmare of a controlling marriage. For others it was a sensible and rational method of managing a household.
I was reminded of this by the annual publication of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures. Both sides of the independence debate triggered to praise or blame, joy or sorrow.
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No matter what side of that particular debate you are on, there are some things the public should understand.
John Major’s Conservative 1992 UK Government introduced GERS as it was thought it would help cripple the devolution debate – or at least help make the case against a Scottish Parliament.
GERS is a metric looking at total spend of Scottish and local government services, factoring in estimations of UK welfare spending and pensions in Scotland. It includes UK Government spending in non-devolved areas such as defence, and allocates a proportion of the UK’s debt interest payments to Scotland.
For revenues, there have been complaints that the data is not collected for Scotland and has to be estimated from UK figures. North Sea oil revenues are geographically assigned, affecting perceived revenue. However, through a combination of offshoring by multi-nationals and the notional percentage return to Scotland, we see very little actual benefit.
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Despite Unionist joy at Scotland’s perceived failure, London and the south-east are the only two regions in the UK to run a revenue surplus. Scotland, in fact, comes in fifth out of the 12 identified regions, according to 2023 figures from the Office for National Statistics. The 10% deficit is significantly better than the north-east of England’s 26% and Wales and Northern Ireland’s 29%.
GERS does not concern itself with what economists call “opportunity cost”. It is a reasonably accurate manner of assessing spending in Scotland. It does not look at what an independent country could spend if it was, for example, to reallocate massive defence spending to welfare payments or business seed capital funding in a non-nuclear Scotland. It wasn’t designed to do that.
However, in the year that sees the 50th anniversary of women being able to have bank accounts and credit cards on their own, perhaps it is time to wonder if the opportunity cost of having to ask our partner for spending money at all times is still the most efficient way of operating an economy.
Peter Newman
via email
JUST how stupid is Netanyahu? No matter how terrible the atrocity committed by Hamas, does he not realise that his so-called “self-defence” has long since morphed into self-destruction?
He must know that his declared intention to clear Gaza of Palestinians by genocidal ethic cleansing has already made Israel less secure. With the ongoing murders and evictions in the West Bank, the mistreatment and even torture of prisoners and now attacks on Hezbollah inside Lebanon, he is ensuring that he, and consequently all Israelis, will be even less safe and secure, as he gives surrounding countries just cause for hatred and desire for revenge. Moreover, every Palestinian who has lost his entire family will almost certainly join Hamas, making Netanyahu an efficient “recruiting sergeant”.
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Do the majority of Jewish people actually support his fanatical determination to go down in history as “the leader who restored all the land God gave them”, no matter the cost to his people? Warnings and pleas about escalation will never affect such a fanatic, only actions. So when will our spineless leaders at Westminster, and their equally spineless allies in the USA, accept the truth of this tragic war and halt the supply of weapons (even if it reduces their dividends in the relevant companies)?
This has nothing to do with anti-semitism, but rather supports the desire of the Jewish people to live in peace and security in their own state, and around the world, alongside peaceful neighbours. Their leader is making this impossible, with our leaders’ help. Ours just sit on their hands and watch.
L McGregor
Falkirk
I FOUND Hannah Bardell’s Saturday article to be a heartbreaking reflection on the impact of homophobia on a young person’s life and wellbeing. I agree with her that that Murdo Fraser represents a terrifying prospect as leader of the opposition in Scotland. It is appalling that young people are still growing up feeling this way, especially in light of recent reports about an uptick in LGBTQ book banning and ongoing attacks on trans individuals. It feels as though Section 28 is making a return by stealth.
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Throughout the gender recognition debates in December 2022, Fraser claimed to be concerned with “women’s rights”. I decided to test the depth of his so-called “feminism” by asking him in a tweet to comment on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s reprehensible suggestion that rape victims should be forced to give birth to their rapists’ foetuses. He responded: “He’s a Catholic; do you hate Catholics?”
This reaction, reminiscent of a teenage boy on a Reddit thread, reveals that Fraser has little genuine interest in women unless he can weaponise our issues to further his anti-trans agenda. This is the same man who trolled Janey Godley with memes suggesting that Donald Trump would have a good laugh at her expense while she was going through a difficult time. It often seems that individuals with one form of bigotry harbour other dangerous views beneath the surface, and these people pose a threat to us all.
Gemma Clark
Paisley
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